Books
Misguided fellow travelers
Jewish thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky don’t deserve
their reputation as astute observers of Israel, a new book proves
DURING A visit in 2012 to Hebron with
the New York-based left-wing Zionist
group Partners of Progressive Israel, Susie
Linfield recalls witnessing the heavy Israeli
security required to keep the small belea-
guered enclave of ultra-nationalist Jews
safe in the midst of a hostile Palestinian
population.
To the Jewish American academic, the
self-contained ghetto of “fanatical settlers”
seemed like an atavistic throwback to a re-
ligiously insular mindset secular Zionism
had set out to eradicate. The experience,
Linfield surmises in her book The Lion’s
Den, made her “ashamed to be a Jew.”
That is a curious sentiment. Whatever the
merits of maintaining a Jewish presence in
Hebron, Linfield is hardly responsible for
the views, deeds and lifestyle choices of
settlers there. By professing to be ashamed
because of other Jews she doesn’t even
know, she inadvertently reinforces the old
antisemitic trope that Jews are a monolithic
entity burdened with collective guilt for the
actions of a few.
Barely the first page into her book we ap-
pear to be standing on shaky ground. Read
on, however, and things begin to look up.
The Lions’ Den is an intellectual history of
several prominent left-wing Jewish think-
ers’ animus toward Israel. For it, Linfield,
a cultural theorist at New York University,
set herself a laborious task. In a political
exegesis of sorts, she subjects to rigorous
scrutiny the words and ideas of such cele-
brated lions of academe as Hannah Arendt,
Arthur Koestler, Isaac Deutscher, I. F. Stone
and Noam Chomsky. Linfield brings plenty
of panache and perspicuity to the endeavor.
Pedantic philippics the likes of Arendt
and Chomsky have long been seen to lend
highbrow heft to the cause of anti-Israel ad-
vocacy. Yet in their substance, if not nec-
essarily their style, their arguments were
often indistinguishable from the manic
outpourings of dime-a-dozen demagogues,
firebrands and rabble-rousers.
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By Tibor Krausz
Running through Linfield’s book is a re-
current insight into the mindset of her cho-
sen leading lights: they could not help but
see the realities of the Arab-Jewish conflict
through the tinted prism of their political
convictions and ideological preferences.
Often, they chose outright to ignore history
and facts on the ground. As a result, in their
voluminous writings on Zionism and Israel,
both got distorted beyond recognition. Like-
wise, they invariably opted to view Israel’s
actions in the worst possible light while ig-
noring or downplaying Arab aggression and
intransigence.
One of the worst offenders has been
Chomsky, a linguist-turned-social commen-
tator who has long been lionized in leftist in-
tellectual circles with an outsized influence
in academia. There are few anti-Israel cal-
umnies to which Chomsky will not readily
subscribe. He has warned of Israelis’ sinis-
ter “Judeo-Nazi tendencies,” labeled Gaza
a “concentration camp... under a vicious
siege,” and insinuated Israeli Jews are edg-
ing closer to ethnically cleansing Palestin-
ians. And he did all this in just one book of
many on Israel, Gaza in Crisis, a collection
of his essays published in 2010.
Meanwhile, Chomsky patronizes Palestin-
ians, whom he often treats as mere extras in
a reductive Manichean morality play of evil
oppressors and their innocent victims. To
Chomsky, Palestinians are “unconstrained
in their search for peace,” as Linfield puts
it, while Israelis are incorrigibly belligerent
expansionists. He refuses to take homicid-
al Islamism among Palestinians seriously,
choosing instead to see its purveyors as
peaceable souls brutalized into resisting Is-
rael violently.
In Gaza in Crisis, for instance, he posits
Hamas “has long been calling for a two-state
settlement in accord with the international
consensus.” In fact, Hamas has never devi-
ated from its stated aim, duly spelled out in
its charter, of eradicating Israel. Chomsky’s
countless other essays and books on Israel
THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 6, 2020
and the Palestinians are similarly tenden-
tious as he turns actual realities on their
heads.
Chomsky obfuscates, distorts and fudges
the facts. In a dubious form of scholarship,
he frequently cites himself as the source for
his own statements in a self-referential loop
of rehashed claims that usually were not
true the first time he made them. “Israel, he
contends, is an ‘ugly’ and ‘sadistic’ society
defined by ‘criminality,’ ‘utter hypocrisy’
and ‘moral depravity,’” Linfield writes ap-
ropos of Chomsky’s views on the Jewish
state. “The shame, and the crime, is that he
has misled generations of young people who
know little if anything of Israeli, Arab or
Middle Eastern history.”
That’s not to say Israel’s actions and its
treatment of Palestinians have always been
beyond reproach. Far from it. Yet by failing
to provide anything remotely resembling an
honest appraisal of them, Chomsky peddles
a caricature of the conflict that no informed
observer can take seriously.
Linfield is charitable about Chomsky’s
obsessive anti-Israeli activism, arguing
“some of his most deeply flawed ideas about
Israel stem from his fears about its survival.”
Is Chomsky a latter-day Jeremiah who cas-
tigates wayward Israeli Jews for their own
sake in his vituperative jeremiads? That’s
debatable, to say the least.
Chomsky hasn’t been alone in passing off
ill-tempered diatribes as learned commen-
tary. In fact, what often differentiates intel-
lectuals from garden-variety kooks is that
the latter are not lauded for their reflexive
prejudices and crackpot ideas. Thinkers like
Chomsky are widely regarded as fearless
truth-tellers. Yet on issues like Israel and
the Palestinians they are often so hopeless-
ly biased that their views are essentially
worthless as anything other than partisan
hucksterism.
Cockeyed views of Zionism have a long
history among leftist Jews who have refused
to take the Jewish state at face value, deeming
it an aberration rather than a necessity. They
often took Israel not for what it was and was
intended to be – a small self-governing haven
for Jews – but for what they wanted it to be
– a pioneering socialist state or harmonious
multiethnic entity. Because the Jewish state
failed to live up to their lofty expectations
they came to despise it.
“Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict are
templates upon which the Left has projected
all sorts of inapt ideologies, hopes, anxieties,
and fears,” Linfield aptly observes.
A case in point is Arendt, who was highly
perceptive about several pressing concerns
of her time but was far less so on the Ar-
ab-Israeli conflict. Arendt was ceaselessly
conflicted about Zionism and Israel, often to
the point of parody. In short order she turned
from a militant Zionist during the years of
Nazi ascendancy in her native Germany to
a vocal opponent of Jewish national sover-
eignty.
Just as Jews in the Yishuv were facing
the prospect of being massacred by hostile
Arab militias she kept on advocating for a
nebulous form of Arab-Jewish common-
wealth without the trappings of an indepen-
dent state. The reason was Arendt saw eth-
nocentric states as reactionary. Massacres,
terror attacks, murder and mayhem – none
of them, Linfield points out, “led Arendt to
alter, or even question, her intercommunal
prescriptions” for Palestine. “She wished
away, rather than grappled with, an existen-
tial clash of claims and needs” between Jews
and Arabs.
Arendt was also maddeningly mercurial.
A few years prior, when Jews were facing
unsurmountable odds to their continued
existence in Europe, she castigated them
for being passive, weak and fatalistic. An
up-and-coming political theorist safely en-
sconced in New York, she rhapsodized about
the historical need for muscular Jewish
self-defense. Yet once Jews in Palestine set
about defending themselves tooth and nail,
she had second thoughts.
“The woman who had demanded an imag-
inary Jewish army now opposed the actual
one; the woman who had denounced Jew-
ish submissiveness now opposed Jewish
self-determination; the woman who had in-
sisted on the creation of a specifically Jewish
political world now opposed the creation of
a state to protect that world,” Linfield notes.
In subsequent decades Arendt remained
ambivalent about the Zionist project, a pri-
mary reason being she “substituted political
theory [for facts], accompanied by a tone of
imperious certainty.”
The same applies to numerous other intel-
lectuals. Yet few left-wing Jewish thinkers
were as insidious at times as was Arthur
Koestler, a prominent Hungarian-born jour-
nalist and writer. In some ways a remark-
able fellow, Koestler was a tormented soul
forever in search of an ideology or political
movement to anchor him in his topsy-turvy
life during the turbulent decades of the 20th
century.
An ardent communist turned fierce an-
ti-communist, Koestler embraced, then dis-
carded, a long series of causes with equal
zeal. A self-described “Casanova of Caus-
es,” he flitted passionately from one ideo-
logical entanglement to another. Frequently
on the move, he was a wandering Jew with
a “homeless mind” in the words of historian
David Cesarani in his biography of the man.
Koestler was also drawn to far-out ideas
and intellectual pursuits, including a pseu-
doscientific interest in paranormal phenom-
ena. Although he started out as a militant
Zionist and an admirer of Ze’ev Jabotinsky,
the Hungarian-born author, who disdained
David Ben-Gurion, came to wax ambivalent
about Israel once it was birthed in blood,
sweat and tears. In a diary entry he dis-
missed the country as a “totalitarian Lilliput
[that] is no less totalitarian for the smallness
of its people.”
Linfield labels Koestler an antisemitic Zi-
onist, a designation occasioned by his acer-
bic contempt for his fellow Jews, whether in
the Diaspora or in Israel, where he returned
repeatedly for longer stays until 1948. (In
his defense, Koestler could be no less scath-
ing about himself.) He pooh-poohed Juda-
ism and Jewish culture, belittling them as
vestigial “fossilized remnants” of ancient
traditions. “Koestler’s smug confidence in
dismissing the religion, history, and culture
of the Jews was matched only by his igno-
rance of them,” Linfield argues.
In anti-Jewish circles, Koestler is best
known for popularizing the notion most
Eastern European Jews, especially in Po-
land, were genetically descended not from
ancient Hebrews but from the Khazars, a
pagan tribe of Turkic-Mongolian nomads. A
number of Khazars converted to Judaism in
the early 8th century before they went on to
create a warrior kingdom between the Black
and Caspian seas. They disappeared from
history in the late 10th century.
The so-called Khazar hypothesis is rou-
THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 6, 2020
tinely trotted out by Jew-haters to deny
European Jews’ ancestral claims to Israel.
Koestler’s aim in embracing it was, in part,
to prove to Ashkenazi Jews, whom he ex-
horted to assimilate into their host societies,
they had little in common genetically with
ancient Hebrews.
The Khazar origins of Ashkenazi Jews, he
posited, should also put paid to traditional
antisemitism, which was fueled, according
to Koestler, by Jews’ irksome insistence on
being a “Chosen Race.” If European Jews
are not semitic in their origin, “then the term
‘antisemitism’ would become void of mean-
ing, based on a misapprehension shared by
both the killers and their victims,” he argued.
Make of that specious reasoning what you
will.
Linfield does not dwell on Koestler’s take
on genetic anthropology, preferring to move
along and set about dissecting the often
equally questionable views and arguments
of French Marxist historian Maxime Rodin-
son, Polish Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher,
Tunisian-Jewish author Albert Memmi and
others. She’s a learned guide through a cer-
tain subset of anti-Israeli obloquy and her
book is a welcome corrective to the reams
of hokum that often passes for commentary
and scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Lions’ Den serves as a timely remind-
er that views held by intellectuals, lionized
though they may be, need to be taken on
their merits and not on the reputation of
those who hold them.  ■
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